The information that a pattern of firing in the output layer of a feedforward
network of threshold-linear neurons conveys about the network's inputs is
considered. A replica-symmetric solution is found to be stable for all but
small amounts of noise. The region of instability depends on the contribution
of the threshold and the sparseness: for distributed pattern distributions, the
unstable region extends to higher noise variances than for very sparse
distributions, for which it is almost nonexistant.Comment: 19 pages, LaTeX, 5 figures. Also available at
http://www.mrc-bbc.ox.ac.uk/~schultz/papers.html . Submitted to Phys. Rev. E
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